Choosing the best landlord management software

01

In this guide

01The short version 02How we scored them 03The scorecard 04Best for a single property 05Best for an HMO 06Best for a small portfolio 07The reviews 08Also worth knowing 09Method and disclosure

02

Who this guide is for (and who it is not)

For: self-managing landlords in England with one to ten properties, no letting agent, and a drawer they would rather not open. Not for: letting agents (this is not agency software), institutional portfolios (hire a person), and landlords in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, whose tenancy rules differ and deserve their own guide.

One more thing, because the question is fair: this guide is published by the team behind Tenurelink, one of the five products reviewed. We say that again at the bottom, we scored Tenurelink with the same rubric as everyone else, and the rubric has no favourites. It gave us 1 out of 5 for tax filing, 1 for reviews and 2 for rent collection, all published below. If we were going to rig this, we would have been better at it.

03

The short version

If your “office” is the kitchen table and your filing system is a drawer you would rather not open, you have plenty of company. Roughly half of England’s landlords manage their properties themselves, which is a polite way of saying half of England’s landlords have an overdue EICR in a drawer they would rather not open.

The right tool depends on what kind of landlord you are, so the verdicts below are per situation rather than one crowned winner. Every product here has something it does better than the other four. Every product here also has at least one genuine weakness, including the ones who paid for the other listicles on this subject.

The short version:

If you…	Start with	And consider
Rent out one property and want the tenancy to run itself	Tenurelink	August
Run an HMO	August	PropReady for licence anxiety
Run 2–10 properties and file tax returns	Landlord Studio	August
Want maximum software for minimum money	Lendlord	Nothing, that is the point
Lie awake thinking about the Renters’ Rights Act	PropReady	Tenurelink

04

How we scored them

Ten capability areas, each scored 0 to 5:

5:the reason to buy. Best in class; start here if this area matters to you.
4:strong. Minor gaps against the leader.
3:serviceable. Does the job, nothing special.
2:partial. Present but thin, or needs another tool alongside.
1:token. A checkbox, not a working capability.
0:absent.

The ten areas: compliance tracking and statutory workflows (gas, EICR, EPC, deposits, Right to Rent, Written Statement, Section 13, Section 8, the PRS Database); tenant communication and portal; repairs and trades; documents and evidence; rent and banking; tax and Making Tax Digital; HMO support; mobile apps; pricing and value; and reviews and support.

Prices come from each vendor’s own pricing page, read in August 2026, and this market reprices itself faster than a letting agent’s fee structure, so treat every figure as “correct as of August 2026”. Scores are judgement calls based on documented features, not vibes. In plain English: we can show our working.

We also weighted the scores differently for different buyers. A single-property landlord does not care about HMO licence tracking. An HMO landlord does not care about anything else. The person weighing the portfolio columns below is Mark’s spreadsheet, and he checked the arithmetic.

05

The scorecard

Ten capability areas scored 0 to 5 for five products, with totals out of 50
Capability (0–5)	Tenurelink	August	Landlord Studio	Lendlord	PropReady
Compliance and statutory workflows	4	4	2	2	5
Tenant communication and portal	5	4	2	2	3
Repairs, maintenance and trades	5	2	2	1	2
Documents, records and evidence	4	3	3	2	4
Rent and banking	2	4	4	4	1
Tax and Making Tax Digital	2	4	5	4	1
HMO and multi-tenancy	4	5	3	3	5
Mobile apps	3	4	5	2	0
Pricing and value	4	4	4	5	4
Reviews and support	1	2	5	3	1
Total (out of 50)	34	36	35	28	26

The headline of this table is not a winner. It is that no product wins everywhere. The all-rounders (August, Landlord Studio) win on breadth. The specialists win their corners: PropReady on RRA compliance, Tenurelink on the tenant-plus-trades working loop, Lendlord on price. Which corner is yours depends on what you actually do with your week.

06

Best for a single property

One property is cheap to serve, so everyone competes, and the weighted scores come out as a photo finish: Tenurelink 34, August 33.5, Landlord Studio 32.

34Tenurelink

33.5August

32Landlord Studio

Tenurelink, by a hair. It is free in early access (up to five properties, every feature), it is the only product here where the tenant gets a portal that outlives the tenancy, and it is the only one that runs the actual working week of a tenancy: tenant messages, trades, quotes, bookings, evidence, signatures, all on one connected space. The new money ledger tracks rent and expenses across the tax year and exports to the software that files your return.

August takes it if the money path decides it. Free tier, open banking rent matching, HMRC-recognised MTD filing at £8.99, and a tenant app your tenant might actually install.

PropReady (£7.99) is the choice if the Renters’ Rights Act keeps you awake: the deepest compliance surface in this group, a fine calculator, and an Awaab’s Law timer, all for the price of a takeaway.

Lendlord is the choice at £0 forever, genuinely: unlimited properties on the free tier. The catch is not much of a catch, which is the point.

Landlord Studio is overkill at one property unless you file MTD. If your property income has crossed £50,000 (the threshold drops to £30,000 in April 2027), its free Go tier plus £5 per submission is the cheapest filing path in this article.

07

Best for an HMO

Weighted scores: August 36.5, Tenurelink 35, PropReady 30.5. The HMO buyer has two jobs nobody else has: run every room as its own tenancy, and satisfy HMO licensing, fire safety and amenity rules without the council writing to you twice.

36.5August

35Tenurelink

30.5PropReady

August, overall. Room-level tenancies with per-tenant rent matching, HMO licensing and fire-safety checklists, and pricing that counts tenancies rather than rooms, so a five-room HMO sits on the £8.99 tier rather than five times it.

PropReady for licence anxiety. It tracks licence status, conditions and expiry, checks room sizes and amenity ratios, and generates per-tenant Section 13 notices with HMO clauses. It will not collect the rent or talk to the tenant, but it will make the paperwork look after itself.

Tenurelink for running the rooms together. Every room is a tenancy with its own documents, deposit and people, and the tenant-plus-trades loop runs across all of them. The money ledger tracks rent received per tenancy.

Landlord Studio and Lendlord are not HMO-native. Unit-based and licence-reminder-based respectively; fine tools, wrong-shaped for rooms.

Also worth knowing: LetCompliance rents by the room with HMO licence tracking, and Rentila models one unit per room at £4.90 a month.

08

Best for a small portfolio (2–10 properties)

Weighted scores: Landlord Studio 36, August 35.5, Tenurelink 33. This is where the tax and banking gap bites. The MTD thresholds (£50k now, £30k from April 2027, £20k from April 2028) land squarely on portfolio landlords, and this guide will not pretend otherwise.

36Landlord Studio

35.5August

33Tenurelink

Landlord Studio, overall. HMRC-recognised MTD with free submissions on paid plans, bank feeds, receipt scanner, mileage, the best mobile apps in this article, and a Capterra rating (4.9 from 146 reviews) that the rest of us can only admire from a distance. £12 a month plus £1 per extra unit.

August, runner-up. The Portfolio tier at £14.99 covers 20 tenancies with MTD, open banking rent matching and the AI assistant.

Lendlord, if cash is the constraint. Free unlimited properties, Premium £12 when you need MTD and open banking.

Where Tenurelink fits: the working layer, plus the money ledger, paired with filing software. It runs the tenancies (messages, trades, jobs, signed evidence, per-property compliance), and its tax-year ledger exports to CSV, Xero, QuickBooks or FreeAgent, plus an accountant pack of the lot as a ZIP. It still does not file MTD, and this guide will not pretend otherwise either. The pairing (Tenurelink plus your existing tax software or accountant) is the honest recommendation for this buyer.

PropReady fits here only if compliance anxiety outweighs everything else (£17.99 for 4–10 properties, no rent collection, no two-way messaging).

09

The reviews

August

The all-rounder, and the most dangerous competitor in this market. August is built for self-managing landlords and HMO operators, from one property to unlimited tenancies.

Prices: Free (2 tenancies, 5 documents). Growth £8.99 (5 tenancies, MTD). Portfolio £14.99 (20 tenancies). Portfolio+ £29.99 (unlimited). 30-day trial; tenants always free.

Good at: open banking rent matching through Plaid, with late and partial payments flagged automatically; HMRC-recognised MTD filing; a genuinely useful AI that reads your documents and turns expiry dates into reminders; room-level HMO management with licensing checklists; a free tenant app.

Less good at: repairs. A tenant can report a problem with photos and you can track and assign it, but there is no quoting, no contractor workflow, no trade network. The Android app is self-described as “basic”, which in the Android ecosystem is what “brave” is in a school report. And the review footprint is thin: 52 App Store ratings and zero on Capterra.

Best for: the HMO landlord who wants rent matching and room-level tenancies without paying per room.

Landlord Studio

The accountant’s choice. Landlord Studio is accounting software with landlord trimmings, and the trimmings are the best mobile apps in this article.

Prices: MTD Go free (3 units; £5 per MTD submission). Pro £12 (3 units plus £1 per extra; free MTD, bank feeds, Xero integration). Pro Plus £24. 14-day Pro trial.

Good at: Making Tax Digital, where it is the strongest product here: HMRC-recognised, free submissions on paid plans, SA105 mapping, receipt scanner, mileage. Its Capterra rating of 4.9 from 146 reviews is the only number in this article that looks like a real software company. Tenants get a portal and a separate app.

Less good at: the tenancy itself. There is no in-app chat with your tenant. The compliance side is generic reminders rather than an England-specific checklist: no Written Statement generation, no Section 13 or Section 8, no Right to Rent workflow to speak of. Maintenance is requests and task lists, not a trade network. And its HMO support is unit-based; room-level rent ledgers are not a thing here.

Best for: the portfolio landlord whose next MTD return is due in August and whose accountant has stopped taking their calls.

Lendlord

The free tier that makes you check the small print. You will not find a catch, which is the catch. Lendlord gives away unlimited properties at £0.

Prices: Free, genuinely unlimited properties (limits apply per feature: 3 valuations a month, 5 documents of storage, 10 tenants on the app). Premium £12 a month or £99 a year: MTD, open banking via Salt Edge, e-signatures, more storage. Premium Plus £36.

Good at: price, obviously. Portfolio analytics (yield, ROI, equity) that the other products here charge for. HMRC-recognised MTD. HMO licence tracking and renewal reminders. A deal-analyser and valuation toolset if you are still buying properties rather than just fretting about the ones you own.

Less good at: depth. Repairs stop at a “maintenance reporting” row on the top tier. There is no room-level HMO management, no two-way messaging to write home about, and the mobile apps have attracted reviews of the “needs refining” variety. Its Trustpilot score (4.7) leans heavily on its mortgage and brokerage side, which is where Lendlord actually makes its money: the software is the shop window.

Best for: the landlord who wants portfolio tracking for nothing and will upgrade only when the tax man makes them.

PropReady

The compliance specialist. PropReady describes its own customer as “self-managing landlords with one to ten properties, no letting agent, no legal team”, which is either flattery or surveillance.

Prices: Starter £7.99 (1–3 properties). Growth £17.99 (4–10). Portfolio £34.99 (11+). 14-day trial, no card. Five free tools with no account at all.

Good at: the Renters’ Rights Act, properly. A personalised compliance dashboard with urgency ranking and live countdowns. Certificate tracking (gas, EICR, EPC, legionella, fire) with 60/30/7-day reminders. An AI document generator that produces Section 13 notices, periodic tenancy agreements and Section 8 grounds letters. An EPC upgrade planner with grant eligibility. Awaab’s Law timers. And the deepest HMO compliance in this article: licence conditions and expiry, room-size checks, amenity ratios.

Less good at: everything outside the paperwork. No rent collection, no two-way tenant messaging (its portal is deliberately app-less, with hazard classification that auto-starts legal timers), no mobile apps at all (“no app download” is the pitch, which is one way of saying “no app”), and a review footprint that does not exist: no Trustpilot, no app stores, no Capterra, no third-party coverage anywhere we looked. It is a compliance copilot, not a management platform.

Best for: the landlord whose Section 21 has just been abolished and who would like to know what the replacement paperwork looks like.

Tenurelink

The one we are obligated to be extra careful about, because we publish this site. Tenurelink is the working-week product: one shared space where landlord, tenant and trade run the tenancy together.

Prices: free in early access (up to 5 properties, every feature, no card). Planned: Solo £7.99 (1 property), Portfolio £14.99 (2–10).

Good at: the loop nobody else in this article runs. Tenant messages with urgency routing (an emergency SMSes the landlord); a job raised, broadcast to distance-matched local trades, quoted, booked, evidenced and signed off into a sealed PDF; a tenant portal that survives the end of the tenancy; per-property compliance with guided workflows for the Written Statement, Section 13, deposit re-protection and Right to Rent; and a money ledger that tracks rent and expenses across the tax year and exports to CSV, Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent, or an accountant-pack ZIP. Free tools for the Written Statement, PRS Database and MTD checker need no account.

Less good at: the things we score badly on, in the spirit of full disclosure. No MTD filing (the exports feed your tax software, the software does not do the filing). No Section 8 generator yet. No rent collection or bank feeds. And it is new: there is no review footprint to point at, which is precisely why the scorecard gives it a 1 in reviews and we sit here recommending you read the other four too.

Best for: the single-property or HMO landlord whose week is made of tenant messages, repairs and trades, and who would like the money side exported rather than hand-copied.

10

Also worth knowing

Four products that missed the main list but matter to specific buyers:

01LetCompliance (free for one property; £14.99 for three; £19 for ten). The most complete all-in-one on the bench: a 0–100 compliance score, Section 8 drafter, rent by the room, HMO licence renewals, Bacs rent collection at 0% commission, and a tax toolkit. It is also about four months old, with no review footprint yet. Watch this one.
02Rentila (free for one unit; £4.90 for 2–5; £9.90 unlimited). The budget option: messaging, landlord apps, rent receipts and demands, maintenance requests, bank import. No compliance tracking, no MTD, no tenant portal. At £4.90 it is cheaper than the ink you would print a rent book with.
03LandlordOS (free up to 2 properties; £9 up to 3, then 50p per property, capped at £19). AI-first, Section 8 and 13 generators, MTD claimed. It explicitly treats a 5-room HMO as one property, which is honest of it, if unhelpful.
04RentVault (from £9.99). Launched July 2026. Open banking with automatic rent matching, Section 8 across all 17 grounds, Xero/QuickBooks/FreeAgent exports. Too new to review; we will revisit it when it has a birthday.

And the two non-software defaults, because they are the real competition: OpenRent (listing plus rent collection, enormous reach) and the NRLA (guidance, templates and credibility at £125 a year, no automation). Also: spreadsheets and WhatsApp, which remain the market leader and are why this article exists.

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Method and disclosure

Method: prices and features were read from each vendor’s own pages in August 2026. Review figures come from Trustpilot, Capterra and the app stores, where available; Trustpilot blocks automated readers, so some figures rest on search results rather than the page itself and are marked as such. Scores are our judgement calls against a published rubric, weighted per buyer situation, with the arithmetic shown. We will re-check every price and re-score any feature that ships before the next update.

Disclosure, the part most listicles skip: this site is published by the team behind Tenurelink, one of the five products reviewed above. Tenurelink was scored with the same rubric as the other four, and the rubric has no favourites. It gave us 1 out of 5 for tax filing, 1 for reviews, and 2 for rent collection, all of which you can read above. If you would rather not take our word for that, we suggest you do not take our word for anything: every claim in this article has a dated source, and the sources are linked.

The best landlord software is the one that matches the way you run your properties. If you manage your tenancies in WhatsApp and your accounts in a carrier bag, almost anything here is an improvement. Which one, the scorecard above will tell you.